Proface

In our previous post, we talked about how an ice company, Favourite Ice, is making hand cut, clear, 2 inch artisan ice cubes and selling them to restaurants to use in their cocktails. Some of those restaurants are charging an additional dollar to their clientele to pay for the extra cost of the high-end ice.

The question we are asking is whether you can make ice identical or similar to this in your own home so you can enjoy fancy ice in your cocktails and serve them to your guests. Like worthwhile experiment, we started with a baseline for analyze comparisons. Our baseline was a 2 inch cube made with regular tap water using the Acuisina King Sized Ice Tray. My regular faucet water has a high calcium content so one could expect it to produce cloudy ice and it did.

The restaurants offering Artisan Ice have stated the cubes are crystal clear and void of mineral taste because they are made with filtered water. My second attempt at making totally clear ice was using demineralized water in the Acuisina tray. While they seemed to be less cloudy, still not the perfection we were trying to get.

The third method was to utilize water filtered inside a Brita water pitcher. The results were improving. I then tried boiling filtered water, cooling it, boiling it once again and cooling it before freezing it. This resulted in a better outcome having less cloudiness. On the other hand, the method that seemed to procure the best results was boiling filtered water and putting it inside the mold while the water was still hot and then placing it in the freezer. This method seemed to result in the least amount of bubbles and cloudiness.

While none of these methods achieved a perfectly clear cube, it is important to note that the companies making artisan ice are employing very expensive commercial equipment to obtain that perfect clarity. So, for household use, boiling filtered drinking water before freezing it and adding it to the freezer while still hot, comes pretty close to the perfectly clear cube. It still accomplishes all of those other benefits of artisan ice: it looks impressive inside a drink, it melts slower as a consequence of less surface area also it chills your beverage without diluting it.